Conference Material

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Now let me just give you an example of that. Last week, I think it was last week, on Monday, we had a workshop with Princeton faculty from the Environmental Institute and the Materials Institute with the teachers from the E=MC2 districts. Which is West Windsor, Lawrence, and Ewing outside of the Princeton area. And the goal is to get more scientists involved in working with teachers in the classrooms. And so we had a workshop and we had teachers with the kits in these districts come forward and open the kits to the scientists. To let them see what goes on inside the kits. It was an eye opener for all the scientists that were there. And it was exciting.

The teachers were really in control of the night. They did a splendid job in captivating the scientists and provoking them to start thinking about increased ways to link content to the process. Now the group that I was in was the group on water on earth. The old oceanography kit. And it's about fresh water and salt water, it's about water movement inland and it's also about estuaries and the like. And the teacher was an extraordinarily gifted teacher, tremendously enthusiastic, and shared the processes and projects that she had developed around this unit.

The first one that she did is before and after drawings. Pre and post assessment. She had the kids draw the sea bottom and draw sort of the alluvial plain as water flowed into the sea before the unit and after the unit. And they were completely different. The kids really had grown. It was an instant snapshot to see that they had learned a whole bunch of relationships and content and vocabulary. It was an excellent way to demonstrate to the students themselves they had mastered the material.

Then one of her units was to take soil in different mixtures, make a hillside, and pour water over it. And one of the teachers, one of the faculty at Princeton, was doing that experiment. And they did it a few times and got different results. As you'd expect because there is a chaotic fractal dimension to this process. And we then shared with the students their questions and their insights and their descriptions and their fair testing of the hypotheses that they generated. And it was very illuminating to see the linkages and to see what insights they gained about why do you get one big channel, what conditions give one big channel and many small channels? What conditions give wash off of the whole slope?

And we were just blown away by how sophisticated these 6th graders were in asking interesting questions and her ability to guide them through the discipline of coming up with answers. But we all then said, "Wow! Do you have a stream next to your school?" And she said, "Yes, I do." And we all said, "Wow! Do you take the kids down to the stream?" And she said, "No, I don't." And we all said why not? And she said, "Can you imagine my school board letting me take 25 6th graders down to that stream with just me supervising?" What's going to happen? Can't do it. We said what about an aide? No, aide's are assigned to my classroom at a different hour and I only have the aide for half of the period, so I can't do it.

What about parents? I have to organize the parents two weeks in advance and I'm not always that far ahead. It became one problem after another structurally. Why she couldn't link this wonderful unit with the real world. How do we get past that? That's critical. There was an opportunity there that we did not cease. To make those generalizations. To let the students see the applicability of what they deduced and examine it in the real world. We could ask the questions. You know, when you drive around the neighborhood, why do they put that, now around construction sites where they didn't ten years ago, the plastic? To prevent that silt runoff from going to the stream.

They could explore what happens when it rains a lot or when it rains a little. What consequences for all the processes they saw in the little tub in the real world. We missed an opportunity there.

The third experiment that she did was the estuary experiment. And this was an interesting one. Because I stood back as a scientist and I just sort of watch the way the pedagogy was. And do you know that experiment? You put a little fish tank on an angle. And you put salt water in and you color it. I think it was colored blue. And then you put fresh water and you colored it yellow. And we were told to dribble it in very slowly. And then just before we did, she said, "Oh, I'm sorry, it's backwards." And we all said, "It's what?" It's backwards. Trust me. Just wait a second.

What she had done is she'd put the fresh water in first and we were going to pour the salt water in. Now I, the scientist, thinks that perfectly fine. Because if you know that estuaries are dynamic and tides occur, salt water punctures into fresh water and fresh water punctures into salt water. So I don't care which goes first. She cared. She cared. So she changed it around and we poured and dribbled the fresh water in on the salt water. That's a missed opportunity to allow students to explore in their own way, even if it isn't the protocol that was called for.

And we did the experiments. It was fascinating. We saw the fresh water and the salt water. It then mixed. We were told dribble it slowly, don't shake it, and it still mixed. In a real estuary, it mixes a whole lot and the only reason it stays separate is you've got continuous inflows, both the fresh and the salt, as it comes in and out. So we didn't use that project as fully as we might have in terms of the dynamics of real estuaries. And this is where scientists can come in, I think, to provide support for the notion that it can be a little looser. There are problems to be understood. Those will give insights. They will complicate the process, but they're real and they're rich and students and you can untangle them with a little bit more effort. Okay?

Now what was really interesting is when we got done with this, she did say, "You notice there's a little bit of yellow creeping underneath the blue?" And we looked at that and said, "Wow, that shouldn't happen. Fresh water should rise on top." And we looked and said, "Yeah, at the back, there's a little bit of yellow." And she said, "All six of my groups of students, all six identified this yellow creeping under the blue. We haven't a clue why that happens. Now you, as scientists, can you tell me why that happens?" We, as scientists, couldn't tell her why that happened either. But we could ask questions and hypotheses.

One was, well, you colored the water so you changed the water. You may have charged it. It's being done in plastic. Maybe there's an adhesion that occurs. Okay? How would you test that? Do it in glass, not plastic. Put some soil in. Put some sandpaper in. Put something in to change that adhesive layer. So you could do that. Another scientist said, "You know, that tank is curved, it's not straight. It could be an optical illusion. You could be getting light bending around and that's really not yellow underneath." Well, how would you test that? Do it in straight edged tanks.

Or, as I did, just lift it up and look from the bottom and you'll see there is no yellow underneath. That it probably was an optical illusion, a weak test. But the point was that two things happened there that are interesting. One, the teacher stopped the investigation. The unit was over. It wasn't part of the unit, per se, but the kids were compelled to want to know why yellow went underneath. And her solution was to ask the experts. Well, the experts didn't know. The experts just modeled what they do best, asking questions, picking and probing, if then linkages.

So it was very illuminating, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the process. But I think it identifies the key points. That content matters and the process doesn't stop. Once we gain mastery of large amounts of material, our comfort level goes up about our ability to pose the questions about what we truly don't know. And I think that becomes one of the critical things that will take this process, which has a beginning and an end, and make it dynamical and self-fulfilling as opposed to just ending.

Okay, that's the prescription for teachers. How about the prescription for scientists, such as me? It comes in two forms. Let's start with the don'ts. What I shouldn't do. I should not provide more detailed knowledge to a teacher about a topic even if I try to do it in uncomplicated form. Garbage in equals garbage out. There's no way that all that extra material, most of which will be superfluous, is going to register. Why burden people with stuff that they can't use as background, as intuition?

Don't be the expert and try to fix the curriculum. Go with the flow. There's good reasons why the curriculum's there. The school district has put together a K-12 integrated system we hope and our job is not to fix it, to say it's wrong.

And lastly, don't get hung up on bringing bells and whistles into the classroom. Don't come in with the fancy equipment to make the measurements more easy and more quickly. Because that's certainly not self-sustaining because when I take them out of the classroom, what have I done? All I've done is confuse the issue and raise expectations.

What should I do? I should listen and observe. I should connect the classroom to the real world and I should model the process of science. As we did at that workshop. And every one of the faculty members was enthusiastic when they were done about the dynamics that they had developed with the teachers about how those eye opening experiences with the kit would allow them to do these three sorts of things. And so we had a lot of people signing on to get involved in the local schools.

What can scientists do outside of the classroom? Well, at the top, I can be an advocate for science at school boards. I can work with science subject area supervisors. I can, with my institution, be it at a university or company, provide resources and time and support to make science be viewed by the public, taxpayers and parents, as valuable. And that we, as people with credentials, care about the systemic change in the community. So we can be advocates, we can play a critical role. At the bottom, we can help design better connections with the parents. We can help build those bridges by providing some of the linkages so that the parents get involved in the process.

Now how can we do that? The first one is easy. We just talked about it. Partner with scientists. The scientists can do what I call the three M's. They can mentor teachers. Bring them into their labs during the summer. They can provide understanding of content. They can be on call to answer difficult questions, direct teachers where to go to build up their background. They can model the process of science. They can be there to demonstrate the critical thinking skills, that what if gymnastics over and over again. Till the teacher gets comfortable enough to call and say, "Can you tell me the answer?" No. "But can you share with me my thoughts on the problem?"

If we can get self-confidence up to high enough a level, where the partnership develops as a discussion and a dialogue, we'll be in great shape. And lastly, the third M is to motivate districts to integrate science into their whole language and all the other competing demands that elementary school teachers have. Figure out ways to blend it, to integrate it, so that it works effectively. So that's the easy one.

I want to share with you two other ideas that I hope will be food for thought as you go through the rest of the workshop. These are just ideas. They're not be all or end all. They are examples of processes that I think are critical. Which is the sharing and the collaboration that occurs between all the stakeholders in improving science education. The first one is to hold what I call student symposiums.

Answer questions about the world around me. It's tedious, it's hard. It's fascinating. But how do I keep going? I share my ideas at workshops with my colleagues. I get evaluated by them by their critiques. I either get funded or not by NSF to continue with my work. It's a partnership of critics that refines and hones ideas and gives me insights and new ways of looking, new windows on the world as I hear other people speak and as they ask me about my system. We share.

Why don't we do that in the schools? As part of our assessment. Not the science fair. I'm not saying that. Why don't we give students a choice of projects by grade level and let them work in teams with their teacher, as a true partnership, and then let them present their work to the grade, to the school? Who might assess that? Not the teacher who was part of the process. What about other teachers from the district? What about middle school teachers to elementary school teachers or high school teachers to middle school teachers?

And why not senior citizens as taxpayers come in and fill out questionnaires about the groups? Do they understand the problem? Were they convincing? Were they compelling? What was their answer? Was I convinced as a listener? All of that can build those partnerships to get all the stakeholders inside the system. Not only to sustain the science, but to sustain the systemic process. Because we're not going to be getting lots of dollars from outside to keep this process going.

And lastly, why not a concept that I call integrative homework? Now integrative is an interesting word. Not only does it mean interaction, but it means inter-digitation and coordination of disparate bodies of knowledge. What I mean by integrative homework is what if that teacher sent home those pre and post-drawings to the parents and the parents were asked to comment on them? Any which way they wanted. This is an idea that came from when I lived abroad and my daughter was in kindergarten.

The English system, they didn't read in kindergarten. The English system was a shared reading program. Where my daughter could take any book, a paperback - and the British paperback books in elementary education are wonderful - home in her little packet with a little notebook. And we would read the story to her. And our obligation was to write down whatever her reflection was on that book. We weren't to criticize it. We just wrote it down. Then we wrote a comment on that comment and talked to her about that. And it went back to the school and the teacher wrote a comment on her comment on our comment and a dialogue was created. Okay?

Which got her interested in reading books and wanting to read what we had written. She saw us writing down our conversation. And it is a very proactive way to engage students in reading. And I'm arguing the same thing can happen in science. Only in reverse. The student brings home their work that the teachers deem is provocative. Ask the parents their comments on it. The student writes it down and the student then initiates a critique of the parent's view. And it comes back to the teacher and the teacher and other students can initiate a critique of individual parents' views.

And that provides those different windows. Just like the student symposium provides different windows. And this keeps the science vibrant and young. It keeps the teacher, the student, and even the parents guessing about what's next. And it's rewarding because it provides the different questions, those discomfirmatory tests that we're talking about all the time in science. So those are the types of sharings and collaborations that I suggest are critically important. And so that brings everybody in.

In the old days, what was science teaching when I went to school? It was teacher to student. A one way arrow. The administration, the parents, the taxpayer provided support, but it was a self-contained operation. Where are we today? We have students and teachers coaching each other. Two way arrows and circles. We have teachers working with teachers. They go to workshops together. So they come back with ideas. They act as each other's safety nets. They support each other in insights. They are there for the teachers. We have administrators and teachers coming. School board members, okay, coming. And so we have top down integration.

So all these ways can pull things together. If we now push that circle outward so we bring in the parents and the taxpayer, we finally have a way, not only to sustain the science, but also to sustain the systemic initiative. And so with that, if I can find it, let's return to our cartoon. And let's overlay it with a different sheet of paper. And let's change some of the wording. Let's call the cloud nature. Nature's obscure. Poses lots of problems that we don't have the answers for. Okay. And so nature rains down compelling problems. And they flood the schools. They flood your classroom. Interesting questions.

You're in the dynamic with the student. How are you going to solve those problems? Well, we now have scientists, administrators, we have parents, and we have taxpayers. All actively engaged inside the system because we've brought them in. We want their values, we want their views. We provide the content, we understand and model the process. And so what's happening? We have energy, we have insight, and resources. That provides the energy. The energy to provide the solutions to these compelling problems.

So we're not talking about reform ideas, we're talking about solutions. Hypotheses with predictions. Those that have been buoyed up by that energy rise up. They start solving the problems. And when they don't completely solve the problems, they nucleate back into clouds to rain down more detailed and more compelling problems. And so we have the self-sustaining science system where the science gets better, it never stops, and it's driven by compelling problems. It's solved by teachers and students with the total support, the energy, the insights, and the resources from other players in the system. Thank you very much.

Okay, I'll answer any questions that you may have. If you have no questions now, don't be bashful, then you can ask me questions afterwards. But someone. Okay, go ahead.

Q: I think your model of the wolves (...inaudible) gets into the problem itself. I asked him about the question of the wolves. I don't want to get into process-content debate. You know, they're two separate things. How do you handle what you know as a scientist about those ecological facts and how much you push them to bring to the table and meld their own information? You see? I think that's where I, as a project director, get questions about. I don't know that, so I can't help.

Rubenstein: You don't have to know that, okay? Part of the problem is, first, you put the grass in the system. Can you get the grass to grow? Then you put one ungulate species or an ungulate species on top of the grass. And most of the times, the ungulates go extinct. Then can you put coyotes into the system? Then can you put wolves into the system? And so in a very real sense, I don't have to know the answer about the dynamics because the dynamics build upon themselves. In other words, if they can't build a stable ecosystem, they can't do the problem.

And so what they're doing is they are asking themselves continuously why is my ecosystem crashing? What am I doing wrong? Now what I didn't show you is there's a tremendous amount of biology that goes into that process. One, each species has a set of critical life history variables. How many babies does it have per year? What's the survival rate of those babies? What is the cost of reproduction in terms of if I invest in those babies, what's my survival rate? Okay, all that's in the first equation. The DNDT on the ungulate. Now what about the wolf?

But more importantly, there's interactions. How much of the vegetation is going to fuel that baby production? And then how much of my dead carcasses is going to fuel the production of the grasses? Okay? And so they have to then build those linkages. And in the process, they're asking themselves is this competition or is it mutualism? So there's a set of relationships that they are deducing, but they've got to figure out based on feedback from their own dynamics and stuff they can read in the literature. So in fact I have to do very little teaching. I just have to sit there and say why do you think it went extinct? What may have you overlooked?

Very much the Socratic method. I don't answer questions in the classroom. I just ask more questions. But I ask the questions in a way that focuses them to go and find an answer. Okay? And they build the ecosystem. And then in the end, another group can say I don't buy your assumptions because we tried that as well.

Q: Okay. But you're leading a class in biology or ecology, for which you have a very broad background.

Rubenstein: Right. That's where the content comes in.

Q: So you're focusing their perceptions, you're channeling and focusing them.

Rubenstein: That's right. I made a decision to allow them to explore this rich array of population dynamics around a problem that I knew something about. But I don't know the detail about wolves. I know nothing about wolves. But I knew enough about the dynamics. I knew it was compelling enough they'd want to do it as well.

Q: As an elementary project director, I get asked or I get told I don't have the background to do that with kids. As an elementary teacher, I don't have the background to do that because I'm not a scientist.

Rubenstein: Right. That's what they tell you. And then the question is is that really true? Our job is to actually explore whether that's fear or whether it's really ignorance. Okay? I don't believe that people are as ignorant as they say. I think people hide behind the fact. But they haven't thought about it. They may be tired, they may have competing demands, they don't want to think about it. But, in fact, most people's intuition about an ecosystem is there. They know competition, predation, and mutualism. And the program asks you these questions straight up.

It gives you a matrix. You have to fill it in. Do you expect a plus/minus relationship between these two species? And then it translates it. This means that when wolves eat your elk, elk numbers go down. So it gives you the sign, it puts it back in English, and then it builds it into the model. Okay?

Q: Maybe it would be fun to, because you just did it to me, is to brainstorm some questions back, to respond to that I can't do it because I don't have the background. And it might be kind of fun to then pose some back to teachers what is it that you need to know. That might be good.

Rubenstein: That's right. And we can do that. And there are times when I run exercises that I know very little about. I'm not a physiologist, but I teach physiology. Okay? So I build labs around concepts that I'm a little dodgy on. And what makes teaching fun for me is when a student asks me a question that I don't know the answer. That's when I'm really engaged. That's when I really get excited by the problem. I don't run from it, I embrace it. So they empower and engage me and we become partners.

Now I can go to the library and learn as much as I can, but I'm going to find out very quickly that my students are bright enough and your kids are clever enough to ask questions in ways that you're not going to know the answer. And it's not in a book and it's not in an article, it's not in Natural History Magazine, it's not on TV, and it's not on the Web. And so you really eventually do have to play the game of ask the question in an if then form. And that's when it's fun. That's when they're teaching you and they're challenging you and you become all of a sudden co-equals with them. Because you're no matter than them. You have more wealth of experience, but you don't have any more answers than they do.

Spresser: This is such a rich discourse that I hate to interject with the fact that, for many of you, it's probably been a very long day and it is getting late in the evening. So may I take this opportunity to thank you, Dr. Rubenstein, for sharing your expertise and insights on how the scientist thinks and what it means to do science, on the differences between school science and real world science, and on some ways of bridging the gap between the way a scientist thinks about and practices his discipline and the way students learn and practice science.

As we begin this local systemic change PI meeting this evening, we have returned once again to the disciplines of science and mathematics as a touchstone for the vision of mathematics and science education. The structure and values that are intrinsic to the disciplines are an essential part of the creation of lasting change in K-12 mathematics and science. These are very much our roots. We thank you, Professor Rubenstein, for helping us return to our roots this evening. And please join with me in thanking him once again.

Rubenstein: Thank you for listening. And if you want to come up and ask questions afterwards, we can go down and have a glass of wine or beer and we can continue this more (...inaudible microphone blip)

Spresser: For the efforts you've made to be here this evening. We've made a substantive beginning on this journey of the next two days towards thinking more deeply and critically about creating lasting change. We hope you have a restful night. We look forward to seeing you again in the morning. Thank you and good night.